Nah, loading screens aren't secretly advertisements in every desktop program. That's really not what's happening here.
Sure, mobile apps stuffed with ads exist. But professional tools? Companies charging $2,000 to $4,000 annually for CAD licenses aren't relying on splash screens to advertise themselves.
There's a massive difference in complexity. Photoshop can have 10,000 lines devoted to its selection tool alone, whereas a barebones version might need fewer than 200. Naturally, lightweight FOSS software starts faster.
Blender and 3DS Max illustrate this pretty well, since I've used them more. Both appear to do similar jobs, yet Max occupied 3.5GB when Blender was under 700MB. Why? Decades of accumulated functionality. Max must accommodate ancient project files, legacy plugins, and numerous workflows, including outdated ones that engineers in their fifties still depend upon.
Reliability matters too. Commercial applications require protections against malicious scripts and users accidentally wrecking their work. Blender, meanwhile, only added a confirmation before closing a working window relatively recently. Previously, clicking X could instantly discard your unsaved work.
And Blender has undergone major rewrites, including versions 2.8 and 5, as far as I know. Starting over helps remove baggage, but can abandon older configurations and introduce serious risks. That's easier when billion-dollar corporate customers aren't demanding uninterrupted compatibility.
Anyway, I started talking about Photoshop and somehow ended up discussing 3D software.
Adobe has decades of engineering tucked underneath its interface. Take its brush engine. I've exhausted available RAM while drawing and watched the whole computer freeze, yet after several minutes, Photoshop still reproduced my entire stroke accurately.
Artcraft's approach is simpler: sample the cursor position at 60fps. Draw a circle quickly enough, and you might end up with an octagon instead.
That's the tradeoff people overlook. Immediate startup feels fantastic, but sometimes those extra seconds represent decades of compatibility, sophisticated processing, protective features, and engineering that lightweight alternatives simply don't contain yet.
A tiny application and a mature professional suite aren't carrying identical responsibilities anyway.
So no, a slower launch doesn't automatically mean someone's making you watch an advertisement.
